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Wicked's Emerald City is a real city with a working bakery, real stores, and a working 16-ton train
Jon M. Chu reveals how far they went with practical effects for Wicked, and we don't just mean the 9 million tulips
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In the movie Wicked, we learn that Oz’s Wizard is a fraud, with no powers of his own. However, I’m starting to believe that Jon M. Chu might be a real wizard. After all, he was able to build an entire Emerald City. During an interview with Fandango, Wicked director Jon M. Chu spoke about his desire to make Emerald City as real as possible.
“We wanted this place to be physical,” Chu said. The director went on to say that most of what you see onscreen is practical, rather than CGI or greenscreen. “We built the Emerald City. You could walk through the Emerald City, go into the bakery shop and look at what kind of sweets they had. You could go into the salon and sit in a chair. You could see the shampoo, and they had labels from Oztech. There is so many different things.”
Even the locomotive was practical. Yes, Chu had production build a working train! “We had a 16-ton Emerald City train that actually moved on track, that they could jump onto.”
Remember all those tulips? That’s right, all of those were real, and you’ll never guess how many were planted. “Nine million tulips we planted. Even though the studio was like, ‘Do you really need to plant nine million?’ And sorry, we already planted it,” Chu revealed.
“This is a spectacle on its grandest scale. I’ve dreamed about making a movie like this since seeing behind-the-scenes pictures of Cleopatra or any of those movies.”
“Of course, we have great CGI artists and ILM and Framestore who are building around it and being a part of this movie of course, but the two together are where we all met. So, I’m really excited for the audience to feel to that.”
Wicked Part Two will be released in theaters on November 21, 2025.
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